Sending to ulpt0

[jessy at muenchen-mail.de]

Good day,

I have asked this question at some other places as well but haven't gotten a
single useful answer. Searches made no results, besides I don't really know what
to look for.

My parents recently bought a Laserjet 1018 printer and I want(ed) to install it
under FreeBSD 6.1. I found foo2zjs wich is a driver collection for GDI-printers.
Well the driver works fine, besides a single problem, which is the worst of all:
The printer needs its firmware sent every time it powers up. I can do this by
booting windows and using the Windows-driver to print a page. Then the computer
freezes and I need to reset. Sick :)

But then the printer starts working, no matter which OS. I can plug it into the
other PC and it prints. I switch it off and back on and it stops working. The
manual for foo2zjs instructs to send the firmware with cat
/usr/share...hp1018.lp >/dev/ulpt0 to the printer, which leads to a timeout
(Device busy)

I tried all possible things, recompiling without tcp over serial interface,
which is said to eat up the device, plugging back and forth which doesnt make a
difference. I also found a patch for ulpt.c which is supposed to fix the
problem, but no avail. I just can't cat to /dev/ulpt0 or /dev/unlpt0.

>From my amateur point of view I have two options:

1. Send the firmware directly to the usb-port the printer cable is attached to
instead of invoking the driver

or

2. detaching the driver from the usb-port, sending the firmware over a generic
usb driver and re-attaching the ulpt driver

Unfortunately I have no single clue how to do this :( Can somebody give me a
hint if this can be done and if so, how? Or maybe there is a simple solution
avoiding this problem?

Thanks in advance for your efforts!

Jessy